Born in 1914, Stafford was drafted in 1940, and
severed as a conscientious objector throughout the war (forestry, soil conservation in
Arkansas and California); in 1948, Stafford published his master's thesis, a book about
conscientious objectors, Down in My Heart (whose title collides meaningfully with
that of his first book, West of Your City), and it was not until he was forty-six
that that first book of poems was ready.

From Alone With America (1974).

Donald Hall

2. Stafford is a poet of ordinary life. His collected
poems are the journal of a man recording daily concerns. That is why his daily method of
writing is relevant to his life's work. You could say that his poetry is truly quotidian:
he writes it every day; it comes out of every day. And the poet of the quotidian did not
find it necessary to become maudit, to follow Hart Crane to the waterfront or
Baudelaire to the whorehouse or even Lowell to McLean's. He got up at six in the morning
in a suburb of Portland and drained the sump.

3. If we attend to chronology, William Stafford
is a member of the tragic generation of American poets. Stafford was born in 1914, the
same year as Weldon Kees and Randall Jarrell and John Berryman, three suicides; Delmore
Schwartz was born in 1913, and Robert Lowell in 1917. How wonderfully the survivor
contrasts. What makes him so different? Like Lowell, Stafford was a C. O. [conscientious
objector] during the Second War. Like Berryman and Kees he came from the Midwest. But
Stafford is a low-church Christian far from the rhetorical Catholicism that Lowell and
Berryman entertained. I suspect that his survival is related not merely to his
Christianity but to his membership in a small, embattled, pacifist sect.

4. The poetic surface is often ordinary (not
always: Stafford salutes a lost Cree inside a knife ... ) with famous dead deer in roads,
with remembered loves, with fancies about wind and weather. This ordinariness doth tease
us out of thought; while we are thoughtless, the second language of poetry speaks to us.
Stafford has referred to an unspoken tongue that lives underneath the words of poetry.
This second language is beyond the poet's control, but we can define a poet as someone who
speaks it. English teachers afflicted with students who lack control over their own
language - ignorant, illiterate, wordless - often assume that the best language is the
most controlled and the most conscious. Not so, or not always so: poets are literate,
poets control, poets command syntax and lexicon - but the best poets also write
without knowing everything that they are up to, trusting in the second language's
continual present hum of implication.

From "Eight Notions," Small
Farm (1979).

Peter Stitt

When William Stafford talks or writes about his
poems - as he has done in many interviews and in the prose pieces collected in Writing
the Australian Crawl (1978) - he almost never views them as finished, analyzable
objects of art, preferring instead to concentrate on the process of composition that
brought them about. To use a type of analogy Stafford himself often uses, we might view
him as an eternal analysand in the psychoanalytic process, one who resolutely refuses to
act the role of analyst to any meaningful degree. This cast of mind may seem typical, but
in fact the degree to which Stafford insists on it does set him apart from his fellow
writers. In the creative process as followed by most poets, there seems to come a time
when the writer emphatically wants to understand, dominate, and shape his materials
intellectually. The overall process may begin organically, with the poet simply accepting
the signals that arrive, but by the time it is finished, the poet knows what is going on
and asserts his control in order to be sure things turn out right. Not so with Stafford,
one of whose "cherished" beliefs is "that a writer is not trying for a
product, but accepting sequential signals toward an always-arriving present."

Well, anyway, I am an admirer of William
Stafford's poetry. First, for the craft that does not call attention to itself - Stafford
admits that he almost flaunts nonsophistication in his work - but which is always there,
being necessary and important just by being there; second, though this is never distinct
from the craft, for the downright power of what he has to say. Writing of "The Farm
on the Great Plains" Stafford said: "plains, farm, home, winter, . . . these
command my allegiance in a way that is beyond my power to analyze at the moment."
Yes, and his world commands my allegiance. I am caught up in his sense of space and time
and of the American Dream, his sense of loss, his sense of joy in the here and now, his
feeling for the land and the seasons, his belief (manifested in the poems themselves) that
the smallest events in our lives and the smallest feelings that travel our spines are
miracles - a puff of air, an extension of muscle and memory as we reach out to turn on a
light. In his best work I come away with a sense of myth, and of prophecy, that I had
better not try to define here.